Under Obambicare, women can choose any kind of contraception to be provided to them at taxpayer expense, regardless of cost. The Dem proposal for women defending themselves with firearms is somewhat narrower.

Leftist Christie Hefner mistakenly conflates the real phenomenon of crime rates spiking in warm seasons when more people are outside (tens of degrees) with a non-existent year-to-year increase due to global warming (fractions of a degree). And we thought ol’ Hugh’s girlfriends were stupid.

Rahm Emanuel is eager to find scapegoats for the violence in his city:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, in his latest bid to pressure gun manufacturers and those who do business with them, asked mutual fund companies Wednesday to “blacklist” and divest from firearms-makers that oppose “common sense” gun reforms.

The Democratic mayor made the request after telling commercial banks Tuesday to stop lending to gun manufacturers that stand in the way of gun control legislation.

The first-term mayor defines common sense reforms as universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons.

“The time is now for everyone to do anything they can to stop these military-style guns and magazines from ending up on the street,” Emanuel said in a statement. “This has to be about doing what is morally right and not what is financially beneficial to their bottom lines.”

He sent letters to chief executives of Allianz, BlackRock, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Vanguard, James Investment Research and Capital World Investments.

Which prompted Libertyblog to send Vanguard a message of its own:

I understand the Mayor of Chicago has corresponded with Vanguard regarding divestment of firearm manufacturer stocks. Although my own Vanguard holdings include no such stocks, I shall stand with the Second Amendment and against bullying. Please let me know if you change your policy so that I might liquidate my Vanguard holdings immediately.

Chinese hackers repeatedly penetrated The New York Times’s computer systems over the past four months, stealing reporters’ passwords and hunting for files on an investigation into the wealth amassed by the family of a top Chinese leader, the newspaper reported Thursday.

Keep this in mind when the Times (a) lectures us on national security issues and (b) tells us it has protected details of some national security secret leaked to them by a “whistleblower.”

Is the Volkswagen ad racist? The one-minute Super Bowl spot has been previewed in order to generate exactly the buzz it has generated. It features the whitest Minnesotan you could imagine, transformed by driving his VW into a stereotypical Jamaican—accent and all, mon!

The bulk of the commercial is the faux-islander telling people to cheer up, punctuated by a drive with his co-workers in his Bug. That drive turns them “Jamaican” too.

People have tended to focus on the accent and “let’s all be happy” stuff, but there are some subtler elements. The guy is busy telling people to cheer up, but never gets any work done; in fact, he’s interrupting other people’s work. At the staff meeting he’s unconcerned that the company is going broke. He takes co-workers on a ride in the middle of the work day, and they come back late for something else. The message: Jamaicans are happy, but lazy.

There’s another implicit message. Jamaicans are more associated with getting high on weed than any other ethnic group on the planet. Ganja, anyone? Jamaica itself is now riven by drug violence, but that hasn’t seeped into the American consciousness.

All in all, a viewer’s assessment of this ad matches his assessment of stereotypical Jamaicans: happy stoners are okay, lazy layabouts are not.